Party in 1991 with Iranian B-boys

Metafilter shared this amazing video from the time capsule. Recorded way back on December 10, 1991 according the video time stamp, watch a group of Iranian guys step up at what appears to be a wedding, doing their (rather impressive) b-boy thing with popping and locking toprock moves to downrock steps, with some power moves thrown in for good measure. Check out the guy in crutches around the 4:45 mark.

One MeFi, stating that they were born and raised in Iran until the age of 18, helps illuminate this video somewhat:

This video started spreading in the Persian blogosphere and facebook scene a couple of months ago. What may be interesting to you is that to me and my middle-class friends, this was probably as strange and alien as it is to you. Now, we are not LA style millionaires. Back when I was in Iran, we didn’t live in Niavaran or Tajrish or other Northern parts. We lived in the center of Tehran. My mom used to be a school teacher, and my dad was a senior engineer. We were pretty much middle class.

The people in this video are not middle-class. Having a wedding (wich is a very very big deal in Iran) in such a small room and the look of the furniture tells me that they are pretty poor. My guess would be either factory workers from the suburbs of Tehran or farmers from a smaller town. They are also very conservative. Note that not only all the women have Hijab, they are also sitting in a separate section of the room from the men. This is not common at all in the more secular middle-class family gatherings.

This video is the kind of wedding you commonly see in Iran’s middle-class (both Tehran and other large cities). Note the mixture of women with and without Hijab. Also, both men and women are dancing.

What is absolutely baffling to me about the OP’s video is the odd mixture of religious conservatism with snippets of modern Western culture. Combination of break dancing and not allowing women to dance in front of the men. It is such an odd combination, and it is very wide spread through Iran. Reminds me to my visit to a very very poor village near the border of Turkey. The villagers (more honestly, smugglers) did not have an indoor bathroom. What they did have was a satellite TV with 100+ channels.